Azarion halted and watched him for a moment before backing away to where his own sword had landed. He kept his gaze on Karsas and casually bent to grab the blade. A fleeting humorless smile played across his mouth when Karsas charged him.
Just as casually, he countered the attack, his years as a Pit fighter evident in the ease with which he handled the sword and fought his cousin.
Gilene steepled her fingers and pressed them to her mouth, hardly daring to breathe as Azarion and Karsas battled.
“I was enslaved, thanks to you,” Azarion said. He caught Karsas across the chest, leaving a shallow cut that split the other man’s leather tunic but didn’t draw blood. “Beaten, raped, degraded.”
“One,” Tamura breathed in a soft voice. Gilene spared her a puzzled glance before turning her attention back to the fight.
Karsas’s own swings were clumsy, his movements slowing. Exhaustion, mixed with fear, turned his features gaunt.
Azarion landed another cut, this one on Karsas’s leg. Like the first, it was shallow. Unlike it, blood welled above the slash in the fabric. “Who else did you ambush or murder to keep your secrets and hold your power?”
“Two,” Tamura said.
Others nearby turned to look at her. Realization dawned on Gilene, and her heart ached for the man who would likely find his justice but not his peace when this was over.
Another slash, this one across Karsas’s abdomen.
Gilene joined Tamura. “Three.”
A cut for every year Azarion had been enslaved because of his cousin’s ambitions and his cowardice.
“Four.”
Karsas cursed Azarion, calling him every filthy name in Savat as well as trader’s tongue, bloody spittle glossing his lips. His eyes were wide, his stare frenzied and hate-filled. He no longer seemed to notice when Azarion cut him, painting him a little redder each time.
“Five.” The crowd joined its collective voice to Tamura’s and Gilene’s.
A grueling, excruciating count that ground out in blood, sweat, and pain.
“Six.”
Gilene prayed it would end soon. She felt no pity for Karsas, but his children stood across the field, their faces buried in their stoic mother’s tunic. Justice and vengeance. The merciless speed of the first had become the prolonged savagery of the second.
At the seventh slash, she no longer counted out loud. By the eighth, she found herself praying, not to gods but to Azarion himself. “Finish it,” she said under her breath. “Please.”
As if he heard her plea, he altered his stance and struck with a sweeping arc of his blade.
“Nine,” the crowd said in chorus, their voices lowered to a grim murmur.
A gout of blood spilled through Karsas’s fingers, and he fell to his knees. Gilene closed her eyes against the sight of his entrails bulging from the gaping wound that split his gut. Azarion had nearly cut him in half.
She opened her eyes in time to witness Azarion end his cousin’s suffering with a hard, clean slash that severed the man’s head from his body. The head rolled in one direction as the body tipped to the side and hit the ground with a dull thud.
The silence that followed was deafening, broken only by Azarion’s clipped voice. “Ten.”
Keening cries of grief rose from the crowd but were soon drowned out by the triumphant roar of those who had sided with Azarion’s bid to reclaim the chieftainship.
Gilene turned to Saruke, who stared at her son with tear-filled eyes. Her mouth trembled. “He lives,” she said, as if still trying to convince herself that Azarion had come out the victor and the survivor of this bout.
Beside her, Tamura reacted in an entirely different way from Saruke, shouting her brother’s name and chanting “Ataman!Ataman!” along with the rest of the clan as Azarion took a victory walk along the circle’s perimeter, sword raised, his face gray. Blood coated his entire left side, but he paid it no heed as he recognized the clan’s acceptance of his leadership.
He paused briefly before the newly widowed Arita and thechildren pressed against her. Her expression was inscrutable when he leaned in and said something in her ear. Her features didn’t change, though her gaze flickered toward Tamura before she gave a quick nod.
By the time Azarion had completed his victory walk and stood before the three women of his household, the crowd had gone riotous with celebration, passing flasks of fermented mare’s milk between them and breaking into impromptu jigs, as if Karsas’s headless body didn’t sprawl before them in the bloodstained grass.
Gilene gathered around Azarion, along with Saruke and Tamura. Up close, he looked even more ghastly, and the serene facade he wore cracked under exhaustion. Pain darkened his eyes.
